 Canada was one of the first countries in the world to legalize the market of cannabis. Can you explain how the regulation looks like in Canada and what are the lessons learned? Sure, so we have a phased approach of legalization. So the law was passed in the fall of 2017 but not implemented yet until 2018 and we started out slow so we allowed things like cannabis flowers and seeds and oils and allowed people to grow plants but things like edibles or vape pens for example weren't allowed. And so one year after that 2019 then the regulations were adjusted to allow those in so it's a bit of a phased-in approach to see how things happen. And it's largely a model where the federal government is controlling licenses for suppliers and the provincial governments and the territorial governments so we have 13 provinces and territories and all and they each have a bit of their own system of how they distribute on the ground and so some of them have allotted for public run dispensaries. I think almost every province or territory has online sales. Some of them have private dispensaries available as well and so they're deciding a little bit about how it's distributed, who has access to the licenses to distribute, what types of form it takes and that. So that's basically the system and right now we're still in a bit of a learning phase where we're trying to get data to see what the impact is. People are naturally curious about whether legalizing cannabis would change rates of use particularly among youth or whether it would affect things like drug driving and things like that and also largely one of the measures we're looking at is whether it's had an impact on the unregulated market for cannabis which was quite large before legal regulation. Is the black market diminishing now? Yes we don't like to say the black market but rather the unregulated market so there is a sign that it's diminishing and so today in the plenary here at the CND Michelle Boudreau, the head of the Canadian delegation mentioned that 30% of the unregulated market had been diminished because of the legal regulation and so they tracked that. I think it's difficult to measure because the fact is it was an unregulated market. They don't report to the government or don't fill out tax forms or things so it's largely an estimate of who's operating in that space and so it's still a guess of how it's been reduced but I think they measure it by known activity of known actors and things like that and how it's reduced. Why was this unregulated market so resistant? Why couldn't it survive so much? Well I think it's just pervasive and so I think Canada has some of the largest cannabis consumption rates in the world particularly among young people where at one point a few years ago it was 47% of all young people had used cannabis at some point in their life and so at one point that was the highest rate in the world and so I think there's largely an environment where a lot of people were producing cannabis and also consuming it and so also a lot of the production of cannabis was being exported to the US prior to states like Washington or Oregon legalizing. There were big markets there looking for cannabis as well and so I think at one point I think there was an estimate that the unregulated cannabis market was worth about $6 to $8 billion US or Canadian and so just like it was just a really long-term and entrenched market that wasn't really the police really didn't have a lot of effect in disrupting it or getting rid of it. So what's were the major shortcomings of the low first like in the first year and how could you overcome those shortcomings? Right so I think some of the things we've learned are largely around how the market should be structured and also around principles that we want to ensure in place around legal regulation. So things like it's really important for a long time the use of cannabis or possession of cannabis or selling of cannabis is criminalized and so when we take the action to legalize the market we want to make sure that people who have criminal records or are currently suffering from criminalization of cannabis are repaired and so there was a lot of talk initially about efforts to expunge records or to clear criminal cases, criminal records but that hasn't been done yet and so there's now a bill that before the federal government around pardons what we call record suspensions which is not quite the same effect and it won't be as proactive and a lot of times people are continue to be stigmatized for activities that are legal today and so that was something that definitely we should have had in place and thought about beforehand. There was also right now the I would say there's largely been a domination in the cannabis market with large companies that are able to be efficient suppliers and have the capital to invest in it and a lot of these people who had been growing illegally and some who continue to grow are not necessarily all related to organized crime sometimes they're just like you know small micro growers like they might be growing like a micro beer or something brewing and those people have not had a lot of easy opportunities to enter into the market and produce legally and so that's changing a little bit slowly but it's something that wasn't really planned out well in advance before that and then I think also just largely around there's some issues around generally access to cannabis now and it's not necessarily equal some places don't have dispensaries where people can go although as I said most provinces have online distribution but not everybody wants to shop for cannabis with you know they want to see it or feel it or experience it and so I think those are some of the things we're trying to figure out and largely our model was created from a very public health focused approach and so restrictions were very tight, prices were set high to discourage use packaging is very secure and child proof and uses a lot of plastic and is not environmentally friendly and it seems to me in my opinion there really wasn't a lot of input or desire to meet the needs of what consumers would use and so I think we have a number where around 30% of people are using the legal market after two years that number could certainly be higher because a lot of people are resisting using the legal market because it's too expensive or it's not the product they're looking for or it has too much packaging or it's not convenient and so I think in hindsight it would have been really valuable to work with consumers of cannabis to create models that they really enjoyed and really wanted to be a part of Can you explain us what is cannabis 2.0? Right, so there's a movement now largely from people who some people who are activists around cannabis legalization and who are heavy cannabis consumers who don't like the current regulated system and so when the government created a new regulated system they also created a whole lot of criminal offenses for people who operated outside the system so for example if you're holding too much cannabis over 30 grams on your person or if you're distributing cannabis to a youth even if you're somebody who's 20 giving a joint to an 18 year old friend and social sharing that's still a criminal activity and you could be charged criminally for that and so things like that and then if you've grown more than four plants for example you're participating in a criminal offense and so I think those people have sort of termed this as like prohibition 2.0 or cannabis 2.0 and so I think a lot of that is just reflective of the fact that the market was created a bit too tightly and the logic that I'm told is that well it's easier it's always easier to loosen up the restrictions rather than tighten them up afterwards so we're definitely encouraging the government to loosen up the restrictions a bit to look a bit more at pricing which is now affected a lot by taxation to try to make it more competitive with the unregulated market and just make it a bit more user friendly and accessible can you say that the Canadian market is overregulated? it's hard to say, I don't know I think from an activist point of view it's amazing we actually are the second nation in the world to legally regulate cannabis and in this environment like at the UN where that's very taboo and it's not talked about and it's not treated very well so I'll give the government credit for taking the step into regulation and I think it's just as it's too early to see the outcome of the system of regulation it's probably too early to say for example it's overregulated like I think we have common objectives of public health ensuring public health, ensuring sort of safety is in place that people are educated and doing it properly my own opinion is we are probably in a point now where we know enough about the system to allow it to loosen up a little bit so I'd say to a degree there's too much regulation it's cannabis, it's not like it's a nuclear weapons for example or handguns it's a substance we know nobody dies from we know that it's consumed regularly around there at the same time we want to create programs that maybe allow young people to discourage young people from using but also understand that if they are using what kinds of harm reduction measures can we put in place for them? We see many Canadian companies going to other countries now and try to lobby there like in Mexico, South Africa what do you think about that? I think it's a problem and it's something that definitely we're concerned about and I think it's sort of reminiscent of colonization and some of the habits of different companies around the world that would exploit for things like sugarcane or for mining companies and so I think largely what we'd like to see is Canadian companies model social equity and in many of these places in Mexico and Jamaica and Colombia people have produced crops for a long time they've produced them in the face of very serious consequences of prohibition and if a system is loosened up now to allow things like medical cannabis or non-medical use of cannabis we really need to create spaces that allow traditional growers and particularly people who are marginalized to have a space in those markets and I think that's something that Canadian companies or with a large capital to invest and with a lot of political clout and even access to things like technology and resources can definitely have the ability to overpower those small-time growers but I think it's really wrong to put our ethics in place and really operate as a good global partner and neighbor and I don't want to say that Canadian companies or cannabis companies from anywhere in the world shouldn't have some role but it really should be driven by the local people and we need to ensure that they have a space in the market and it's not just Canadians getting rich off of these but these local people can make a living as well